Cobalt is a hard silvery metal, or the deep blue made from it. Cobalt blue, cobalt ore, a cobalt compound.
The blue has been used in glass and ceramics for thousands of years and is one of the most stable pigments there is. The metal is essential in lithium batteries, and most of it comes from the Democratic Republic of the Congo, where the conditions of mining are a serious ongoing concern. Note that cobalt is named after a goblin.
1nouncobaltA hard silvery metal.
“The deep blue glass gets its colour from cobalt.”
2noundeepThe deep blue made from it.
“She painted the front door a bright cobalt that matched the sea.”
cobalt is a metal, or a colour.
German Kobalt is the same word as Kobold, a goblin. Miners blamed goblins for ore that gave off poisonous fumes and yielded no useful metal, and the name stuck.
German
Kobalt
English, today
cobalt
Built from
From German Kobalt, formerly also Kobald, ‑olt, ‑old, ‑elt, ‑el, apparently the same word as Kobold (“goblin”), from Middle High German -, which became also a Harz Mountains silver miners’ term for rock laced with arsenic and sulfur, so called because it degraded the ore and made the miners ill. a doublet of kobold.
Etymology from Wiktionary, CC BY-SA
Practised in A Song of Ice and Fire